Nelle wrote a great post for us last week, and by comment 21, Biden had stepped down.
So I want to give all of us another chance to see how Nelle talks to people she meets, building connections and community, which is great in itself, but it’s also necessary to win elections.
So here you go, take 2, with an updated introduction from Nelle!
A Whole New World?
That was a week. I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon. A week ago, WaterGirl posted my writing on what I am trying to do – in terms of talking to people – to win this next election. Shortly after it went up, news came that Joe Biden was no going to run. All kinds of things broke loose with the endorsement of Kamala Harris, leaving the pundits in the dust. Where I would like them to remain. Oh, well, we all have our fantasies.
A week ago, I was also writing some short drafts for “Grandma” TikToks to try to find an angle to get young people excited about going to vote. Those are irrelevant now. A lot of young people are very excited. Even a 59-year-old woman looks young, compared to a 78-year-old Donald Trump, to a 19-year-old.
So, I’ve been thinking about how I, a 73-year-old woman, adjust my outreach and pitch. Frankly, it is time for passing the torch, but it doesn’t mean sitting on the sidelines. It means that I can truly be more of a grandma, encouraging and supporting young people to take the lead.
Here’s what I thought of so far. One, helping set up voter registration tables, if possible, on college and community college campuses when school opens in August. We’ve got experienced D leaders in getting permission and who have the patter down. So, in this, I’ll likely just be at the booths for some of the two hour shifts. The high schools generally have a strong voter registration push here, but I also want to be alert to other venues. Des Moines has a big skate park. That might be a possibility.
As I’ve noted, I’m big on building community. Getting young people into the habit of voting in every election is the goal. It might help if they felt a sense of community. Because we can identify registered voters by age, I’m proposing to my city GOTV leader that we have suppers for the younger people where they can meet each other. A little politicking but mostly, just a social evening. Maybe some board games. The grandmas and grandpas provide the food (asking them to let us know if they are vegetarian or vegan, beforehand, too).
I’m just starting to think in these directions. I would love to get more suggestions of possible actions from all of you.
Talking to People
by Nelle
I’m focused on building community, both within and beyond political connections. I’ve moved a lot, mostly due to my husband’s refusal to change scientific data to suit government officials (he’s a water quality specialist). I have had to build a sense of community over and over (eight states and two countries in our 44 years of marriage). I don’t have time to waste, waiting for others to come to me. I usually had a list of ten or twelve things to do the first two weeks in a new place. I would discard what didn’t work.
I moved to Iowa less than a year before Covid. Two things made a difference. We moved into a suburb that has sidewalks on both sides of the streets, so during lockdown, neighbors walked a lot. We also bought a house with a big front porch. We sat on that porch during lockdown and chatted with people across the lawn as they walked by on the sidewalk. I put up a sign for a Democratic candidate for Senate. A couple walked by and asked me about it. It turns out that they are a retired couple who pretty much spend full time getting out the vote for Democrats in our suburb. They immediately recruited me to do what I could (summer of 2020).
This is the more formal part of what I do. The suburb is divided into turfs, neighborhood areas. Each turf has a leader who is charged with getting out those registered Democrats to the polls. I’m the turf leader for my neighborhood – there are 75 or so registered D’s in this neighborhood. I used to do the next one too, but then one of my neighbors decided to step up and do that. If he doesn’t rehab from surgery next week, I’ll pick that up again.
I do several rounds of the neighborhood to drop literature, for the primary and the general. I ring the doorbells and try to talk to as many as I can. Since I’m on my fifth year of doing this, most of them know me by now. One thing that I notice is that I have several new registered Democrats in their late teens and early twenties, all newly eligible since the last presidential election. A number of them are the only registered D in the household. I had one mother, a registered R, remind me to be sure to bring the literature around for her 19 y.o. daughter so that she also could read it. For the mom, reproductive health issues are paramount and she indicated that she needed D literature for herself to read.
We track absentee ballots too (the organizing couple give us updated spreadsheets throughout the voting season). When I see that some of my neighbors have requested absentee ballots, but not turned them in, I contact them to see if they have questions I can help with. By now, I also know who likes to vote in person. I carry out reminders to vote the week before the election for those who haven’t recorded votes during early voting.
Informally, I walk the neighborhood for exercise but also for chatting. I know that an older couple is in ill health and check to see if we should organize a meal train. I know that my neighbor’s father, on the West Bank, had brain surgery and he had to fly back to move his father to Jordan. We talk about the situation there for Palestinians. Since the 1970’s, Iowa has been welcoming to refugees and there are about ten Bosnian families, three Vietnamese families, one Cambodian family in our neighborhood. I look for informal ways to connect with them, despite some language challenges.
I also talk to some of my Republican neighbors, particularly some who call themselves “people of faith.” That’s how I sometimes find the cracks in what they are thinking. One was upset about immigration. The Bible, she said, teaches us to welcome the stranger and she was upset at the anti-immigrant message from her party. That will be a little crack that I’ll try to widen over the next two months.
I set up a biweekly coffee gathering at the local coffee shop for a group of about eight women, several who are older and live alone. We chat about politics, yes, but also about other challenges that face our families. We’ve gotten to know the young people who work there and they sometimes take their breaks with us, sitting down to tell us what is important to them.
As I’ve noted previously on Balloon-Juice, I have another informal project to talk to young people, to reach across the fifty-year divide between them and me, to find out their issues. This is not quantifiable and less partisan, but more of a desire on my part to know what they wish their elders would address. I do a lot of this at that coffee shop, but really, most anywhere I might run into them. I’m genuinely interested in listening, not recruiting as such. I think most of them pick up on that.
Then there is porch wine. As I mentioned, we have a big porch and I invite others that I’ve gotten to know through my GOTV work to come and chat. Through these last weeks, we’ve needed the comfort of each other to sort out the confusion of feeling as bewildered by the Democrats as we have been by the Republicans. We had such a gathering late afternoon today, and there was a request that we do this every two weeks for now. They are feeling betrayed by Democratic behavior.
I find myself in the role of comforter/cheerleader. The propagandists, the ones playing the game for power, will be delighted by our despair. I refuse to give it to them. I’m not the daughter of a WWII veteran, the wife of a Vietnam veteran, who is willing to ignore the suffering that they went through to protect democracy. I act in honor of their legacy.
My message to my neighbors right now is to ignore the individuals at the top of the tickets. We have no power over that. It’s above our pay grade. What we do know with blinding clarity is that there are two teams in the running. One wants to protect democracy. One wants to dismantle democracy. It is that simple. We’re on team Democracy and we resolve to do what we can.
rikyrah
Hi Nelle.
Thanks for the great post :)
OT -that porch is the stuff dreams are made of
Baud
So it’s Nelle’s fault!
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I am not superstitious, but I think we should hang Nelle as a witch just to be sure.
Sorry, Nelle.
tommyspoon
I love Nelle!
Bupalos
@Baud: Right. If she had just posted 2 weeks earlier, we’d be further ahead now and no one would want to crucify Adam Schiff.
Mike E
I’m a retired canvasser with a 20+ year career (mostly out in the field then a few years on the phones) and I see you, Nelle! Keep up the good work!
Kristine
@rikyrah: Yup—definitely feeling the porch envy.
Bupalos
I love the practical framing here and emphasis on community and connection. Conducting politics on this level is about finding where our interests and our lives overlap, emphasizing those things, and refusing to moralize people out of the circle.
Mousebumples
Thanks for your awesome work, Nelle!
To anyone looking to get involved in the US, I’m going to drop a link to Mobilize.us and/or point people to WaterGirl’s great 2024 Activism post on the top toolbar (or hamburger menu on mobile).
I’d love to flip Iowa back someday. I remember when they were the 2nd (? 3rd?) state to legalize gay marriage with their State Supreme Court.
That was less than 20 years ago, I think. Feels like much longer ago.
lowtechcyclist
Off-topic a little bit maybe, but bless her heart (in the good sense of the term!) for not memory-holing all that the Bible has to say about this. Because the Old Testament is very insistent on welcoming foreigners.
E.
I’m thinking the same ways but from a canvassing perspective. Are you better off trying for a relationship of sorts with your voters so that you can return the next election, reinforce habits, get people to vote in primaries? Make 100 percent sure they vote? Or are you better off with lots and lots of drive-bys? But all the canvassing data vanishes after each campaign.
lowtechcyclist
@Omnes Omnibus:
First maybe let’s check to see if she weighs the same as a duck? ;-)
citizen dave
My normie wife saw the photo and said “that’s the kind of house I want to live in” . Great porch. And Nelle, you rock! Unbelievable everything you do.
Omnes Omnibus
@lowtechcyclist: Better safe than sorry.
Nelle
I’m going to be in and out as the big tree on the right came down with one of our wild storms during the night. Almost done with storm cleanup, just I’m time for the next storm. My husband is community building with neighbors with chainsaws. Back soon.
frosty
@E.: Nelle is acting like a Block Captain. I have a friend in Albuquerque doing the same thing. When I asked about it here in the PA “T” they told me we don’t have enough volunteers to do it.
I’ve also been frustrated that all the canvassing data goes away and we start every election from scratch. The Obama campaign organization was awesome. Four years later, all lost, like tears in the rain.
lowtechcyclist
@frosty:
That’s crazy! That might have made sense 30-40 years ago, but in the 21st century?? AYFKM?!
Kate
Thank you for this inspiring write up.
That is one welcoming porch!
Maybe check out The Family Dinner Project Community Dinner Guide? 85 pages, lots of fun conversation starters at pg 80ish.
Also, karaoke?
Nelle
Okay, I’m back and needing some suggestions for engagement with the youths. A candidate had an event at Raygun (great T-shirts, often political – https://www.raygunsite.com/collections/city-des-moines ), thinking it might draw people in. Specifically for people from 18 to 29. Hardly anyone came.
We need ideas or do the young not want to congregate, meet new people? Not when old people are around
Karaoke might do it.
Nelle
I grew up with a carpenter father who was always out helping someone put on a roof or hang a door (uncompensated, of course. It was what friends and acquaintances did). He also did tornado cleanup with Mennonite Disaster Service.
I just watched a group of neighbors pull out chainsaws, cut up our tree, and load it on another neighbor’s trailer to be hauled to the landfill. My 17 year old neighbor joined them and helped them get the load on and secured before the next storm.
Last week, my husband helped assemble a gazebo for another neighbor who was frantically trying to get it done when some necessary surgery got moved up in the schedule. Two 20 year old grandsons came by and got involved.
So all this has me wondering about work parties, particularly for young men, to make some sort of difference. We were living in New Zealand at the time of the big Christchurch earthquake. Students formed a volunteer army to clean up a lot of the damage from liquifaction. Working together for a purpose is important. What do you think?
H.E.Wolf
@Nelle:
A quick note to say how much I admire your work. Thank you, and may you see the fruits of your labors this November and for many years to come!
zhena gogolia
You are a MUCH better person than I am!
Mousebumples
@Nelle: I forget where you said you were, relative to Des Moines, and it’s been years since I lived there. And I’m no longer a youngun’ so take this all with a grain of salt –
Any changes in youth activity based on the calendar? (eg when college or high school are back “in session”)
Any local groups to connect with on campus? I vaguely remember an environmental group that made signs and went to both GOP and Dem political rallies. (yes, I was in Iowa for the Dean Scream)
I feel food is often popular. I’m also not sure how many students (if that’s your target population) have cars, so location or transportation may be a challenge for some. That Raygun store looks like fun, though!
Good luck!
zhena gogolia
@Nelle: Could there be something oriented around pets?
zhena gogolia
@Mousebumples: PIZZA draws young people like bees to honey
Mousebumples
@zhena gogolia: yes! Very true!
@Nelle – I emailed WaterGirl with more specifics that might be helpful (eg groups that might be open to outreach or coordination). Good luck!
WaterGirl
@E.: I think whoever is organizing the canvassing should tell you the answer to your question. The answer may be different at different times, and in different places.
WaterGirl
@Nelle:
Seems like a fabulous idea to me!
I think by the time you got that organized, it would be after Nov. So maybe something more for 2025?
Hey, maybe call it Project 2025? That has a ring to it. //
E.
@WaterGirl: I have never had a canvassing coordinator or anyone else have any answer to these questions. It’s very very pre-Moneyball in this world, I am finding. Everyone still seems to think campaign canvassing is an art. It’s not.
WaterGirl
@E.: Really? When I canvassed for Obama before the primaries (well, caucus) in 2007-08, they were very clear about that.
Personally, I think when you are canvassing it has to be about THIS election. You don’t try build long-term relationships during canvassing. You can do that between the key elections.
For now it’s getting to as many doors as you can, making the connections you can, getting the commitments you can, giving them a little something to chew on before you leave, and move on to the next door.
Just my two cents.
Torrey
@WaterGirl:
Seconding this. Canvassing requires one set of skills and operates in one time frame, while building connections requires a different set of skills (not mutually exclusive with canvassing, of course, and there may be some overlap) and operates on a different time frame.
It seems to me that (a) there should be some materials developed, if there aren’t already, for effective connection building and (b) Democrats, in particular, would do well to focus on building connections. Nelle’s posts have shown how this can work, within the context of simply being sociable and a good neighbor. Working on a longer timeline than canvassing plays to Democrats’ strengths, since we’re the party with the policies that people actually agree with.
NaijaGal
Thank you so much Nelle for all that you do! Really inspiring!